Developer Builds Search Engine From Scratch, Then Compares It to Apache Lucene

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A software developer set out to understand how large-scale search bars like Google's actually work, studying techniques such as inverted indexing, BM25 ranking, Trie structures, and BK-trees. The exploration led to the discovery of Apache Lucene, an open-source search library that underpins many modern search systems, including MongoDB's Atlas Search. To compare approaches, the developer built two parallel projects: one coded from scratch and another leveraging Atlas Search on top of Lucene. A web crawler was configured to index Microsoft's .NET documentation from the web as the shared data source for both implementations. The experiment aimed to measure real differences in development time, lines of code, and search quality between reinventing the wheel and using an established library.

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